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So That Nobody Has To Go To School If They Don't Want To by Roger Sipher A decline in standardized test scores is but the most recent indicator that American education is in trouble. One reason for the crisis is that present mandatory-attendance laws force many to attend school who have no wish to be there. Such children have little desire to learn and are so antagonistic to school that neither they nor more highly motivated students receive the quality education that is the birthright of every American. The solution to this problem is simple: Abolish compulsory-attendance laws and allow only those who are committed to getting an education to attend. This will not end public education. Contrary to conventional belief, legislators enacted compulsory-attendance laws to legalize what already existed. William Landes and Lewis Solomon, economists, found little evidence that mandatory-attendance laws increased the number of children in school. They found, too, that school systems have never effectively enforced such laws, usually because of the expense involved. There is no contradiction between the assertion that compulsory attendance has had little effect on the number of children attending school and the argument that repeal would be a positive step toward improving education. Most parents want a high school education for their children. Unfortunately, compulsory attendance hampers the ability of public school officials to enforce legitimate educational and disciplinary policies and thereby make the education a good one. Private schools have no such problem. They can fail or dismiss students, knowing such students can attend public school. Without compulsory attendance, public schools would be freer to oust students whose academic or personal behavior undermines the educational mission of the institution. Has not the noble experiment of a formal education for everyone failed? While we pay homage to the homily, "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink," we have pretended it is not true in education. Ask high school teachers if recalcitrant students learn anything of value. Ask teachers if these students do any homework. Quite the contrary, these students know they will be passed from grade to grade until they are old enough to quit or until, as is more likely, they receive a high school diploma. At the point when students could legally quit, most choose to remain since they know they are likely to be allowed to graduate whether they do acceptable work or not. Abolition of archaic attendance laws would produce enormous dividends. First, it would alert everyone that school is a serious place where one goes to learn. Schools are neither day-care centers nor indoor street corners. Young people who resist learning should stay away; indeed, an end to compulsory schooling would require them to stay away. Second, students opposed to learning would not be able to pollute the educational atmosphere for those who want to learn. Teachers could stop policing recalcitrant students and start educating. Third, grades would show what they are supposed to: how well a student is learning. Parents could again read report cards and know if their children were making progress. Fourth, public esteem for schools would increase. People would stop regarding them as way stations for adolescents and start thinking of them as institutions for educating America's youth. Fifth, elementary schools would change because students would find out early they had better learn something or risk flunking out later. Elementary teachers would no longer have to pass their failures on to junior high and high school. Sixth, the cost of enforcing compulsory education would be eliminated. Despite enforcement efforts, nearly 15 percent of the school-age children in our largest cities are almost permanently absent from school. Communities could use these savings to support institutions to deal with young people not in school. If, in the long run, these institutions prove more costly, at least we would not confuse their mission with that of schools. Schools should be for education. At present, they are only tangentially so. They have attempted to serve an all-encompassing social function, trying to be all things to all people. In the process they have failed miserably at what they were originally formed to accomplish.

Citations

...d for the lexicon and close by showing the demands that summarization creates for interpretation. 2 Overview of the system SUMMONS is based on the traditional language generation system architecture [=-=McKeown 1985-=-; McDonald 1986; Hovy 1988]. A typical language generator is divided into two main components, a content planner, which selects information from an underlying knowledge base to include in a text, and ...

...g the summary only. While some previous approaches use statistical techniques to extract one or more sentences from the text which can serve as a summary with modest success (e.g., [Rau et. al. 1994; =-=Paice 1990-=-; Economist 1994]), summarization in general has remained an elusive task. In this paper, we present a system, SUMMONS (SUMMarizing Online NewS articles), to summarize full text input using templates ...

...4]. In particular, we used FUF to implement the lexical chooser, representing the lexicon as a grammar as we have done in many previous systems (e.g., [Elhadad 1993; Robin 1994; McKeown et. al. 1993; =-=Feiner and McKeown 1991-=-]), and thus the main effort was in identifying the words and phrases needed for the domain. The content planner, implemented in PERL, features several stages, as does the PLANDoc system. It first gro...

...y showing the demands that summarization creates for interpretation. 2 Overview of the system SUMMONS is based on the traditional language generation system architecture [McKeown 1985; McDonald 1986; =-=Hovy 1988-=-]. A typical language generator is divided into two main components, a content planner, which selects information from an underlying knowledge base to include in a text, and a linguistic component, wh...

... role, and ffl the FUF (Functional Unification Formalism) [Elhadad 1991; Elhadad 1993] sentence generator, which uses a large systemic grammar of English, called SURGE 3 [Halliday 1985; Elhadad 1993; =-=Robin 1994-=-] to fill in syntactic constraints, build a syntactic tree, choose closed class words, and eventually linearize the tree as a sentence. Input to SUMMONS is a set of templates, where each template repr...

...sists of ffl a lexical chooser, which determines the high level sentence structure of each sentence and the words which realize each semantic role, and ffl the FUF (Functional Unification Formalism) [=-=Elhadad 1991-=-; Elhadad 1993] sentence generator, which uses a large systemic grammar of English, called SURGE 3 [Halliday 1985; Elhadad 1993; Robin 1994] to fill in syntactic constraints, build a syntactic tree, c...

... several articles are summarized, evaluation would need to use different summaries found in the corpus for the same earlier articles and rate the generated summary against these multiple models (see [=-=Hatzivassiloglou and McKeown 1993-=-] for an evaluation metric using multiple models). Our summary generator could be used both for evaluation of message understanding systems by using the summaries to highlight differences between syst...

...rences across articles. Work in summarization using symbolic techniques has tended to focus more on identifying information in text that can serve as a summary (e.g., [Young and Hayes 1985; Rau 1988; =-=Hahn 1990-=-]) as opposed to generating the summary, and often relies heavily on scripts (e.g., [Dejong 1979; Tait 1983]). One exception is work at Cambridge University on Sentences from earlier article: The bodi...

... the woman, Bergen said... Summary sentence in later article: In the most serious incident of the year, four people drowned... Figure 9: Summary cues. identifying strategies for summarization [Sparck =-=Jones 1993-=-] which studies how various discourse processing techniques (e.g., rhetorical structure relations) can be used to both identify important information and form the actual summary. While promising, this...

...uring it around threads of articles on the same events with later articles including summaries, and identifying summarizing phrases. This seed work will allow us to apply automated techniques (e.g., [=-=Smadja 1991-=-; Smadja, McKeown, and Hatzivassiloglou 1995; Robin 1994]) to further corpus analysis since we now have a database of lexical phrases that are used to mark summary material. By identifying the charact...

...ying information in text that can serve as a summary (e.g., [Young and Hayes 1985; Rau 1988; Hahn 1990]) as opposed to generating the summary, and often relies heavily on scripts (e.g., [Dejong 1979; =-=Tait 1983-=-]). One exception is work at Cambridge University on Sentences from earlier article: The bodies of three men and a woman were pulled from the bay. The men were not immediately identified. Authorities ...

... and differences across articles. Work in summarization using symbolic techniques has tended to focus more on identifying information in text that can serve as a summary (e.g., [Young and Hayes 1985; =-=Rau 1988-=-; Hahn 1990]) as opposed to generating the summary, and often relies heavily on scripts (e.g., [Dejong 1979; Tait 1983]). One exception is work at Cambridge University on Sentences from earlier articl...